atively
speaking, so many painting and other art academies, technical schools,
museums and art collections, as Germany. Other countries may be able to
make better showings in their capitals, but none has such a distribution
over its whole territory as Germany. In point of art, Italy is the only
exception.

While the bourgeoisie of England had conquered a controlling power over
the State as early as the middle of the seventeenth, and the bourgeoisie
of France towards the end of the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie of
Germany did not succeed until 1848 to secure for itself a comparatively
moderate influence over the government. That was the birth year of the
German bourgeoisie as a self-conscious class: it now stepped upon the
stage as an independent political party, in the trappings of
"liberalism." The peculiar development that Germany had undergone now
manifested itself. It was not manufacturers, merchants, men of commerce
and finance who came forward as leaders, but chiefly professors, squires
of liberal proclivities, writers, jurists and doctors of all academic
faculties. It was the German ideologists: And so was their work. After
1848 the German bourgeoisie was temporarily consigned to political
silence; but they utilized the period of the sepulchral silence of the
fifties in the promotion of their task. The breaking-out of the
Austro-Italian war and the commencement of the Regency of Prussia,
stirred the bourgeoisie anew to reach after political power. The
"National Verein" (National Union) movement began. The bourgeoisie was
now too far developed to tolerate within the numerous separate States
the many political barriers, that were at the same time
economic--barriers of taxation, barriers of communication. It assumed a
revolutionary air. Herr von Bismarck understood the situation and turned
it to account in his own manner so as to reconcile the interests of the
bourgeoisie with those of the Prussian Kingdom, towards which the
bourgeoisie never had been hostile, seeing it feared the revolution and
the masses. The barriers finally came down that had hampered its
material progress. Thanks to Germany's great wealth in coal and
minerals, together with an intelligent and easily satisfied working
class, the bourgeoisie made within few decades such gigantic progress as
was made by the bourgeoisie of no other country, the United States
excepted, within the same period. Thus did Germany reach the position of
the second